Sunday, February 25, 2007

random thought: how do they create the distressed effect on new Jeans? Do they have sweatshop workers rubbing them with wire brushes or do they get rockbands to wear them on tour for a year or so...

Also why does Youtube (and some other sites) keep telling me I need to install the latest flashplayer when I already have it? it's annoying!

here's a quick review I wrote for the latest album from BT which I got for Christmas from my Amazon wishlist. It should appear on their site in a week or two.

On this album BT has tried to create a very high-brow serious record - he probably wanted it to be his "Tubular bells" or something similar. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to be qualified or accomplished enough in terms of composition or musical ideas to achieve what he set out to do. Instead what you get is a few, very unremarkable ideas repeated endlessly, and stretched out with lots and lots of his trademark very clever and over-indulgent production tricks which quickly become irritating, and to anyone who appreciates serious music it comes across as utterly pretentious. It's a few derivative ideas that might work well in a dance record but when dressed up as something more weighty, it just doesn't work. The final video on the DVD, which consists of home movie footage of himself and his children, coupled with some very sickly sentimental prose about life and family, perfect demonstrates just how incredibly self-indulgent and preposterous the whole project is. He should stick to making dance records and not try to kid people that he's a more serious artist than he actually is. I doubt many people could endure this album to the end, or ever want to hear it again.

I've loved all of Kirsty's work up till now, especially those tracks with Way Out West, BT, Hybrid etc so had high hopes of this album and bought it on the strength of the first track. Unfortunately the rest of this album left me sorely disappointed. With the exception of "Black out" which is previously released and "reach for me" which is completely incongruous on here, the other tracks sound like demo outtakes which have hastily had some extra production thrown in to fill up the space on the album. The style I would describe predominantly as derivative amateurish trance and in places the vocals sound like they are improvised and are actually quite out of tune in places. It's as if they didn't have to time to do a retake of the vocals and had to make do with leftovers from other projects. The other producers mentioned above would never have put their name to such sloppy work. It's a great shame.

but don't worry I did get lots of other albums which I love to bits (Imogen Heap, monolake, er, Keane) I guess I just love to moan about disappointment...